Weekly Assignment #149: 12 in 1

For this assignment you are allowed (and actually encouraged) to use your archives.

Pros often have to deal with pressing deadlines. Be it a magazine issue being sent to print, or racing for upload trying to beat up the competition, deadlines are an inevitable part of many photographers.

For this Class we're going to create an artificial deadline and try to meet it to the best of our abilities.

Preparation steps (not timed, can be done in advance)

From your archives, randomly select 240 original (unprocessed) images.
Preferably RAWs (without the associated XMP sidecar files).
One way to make a random choice is to "find" a whole bunch of images, say from year 2009, sort them by filesize, and the choose top (or bottom) 240 ones.

Copy them to a separate folder/location

Clean any postprocessing steps if any
If they are RAWs with your processing steps stored inside - drop them on those copies.

Create a thumbsheet
Create a single image displaying the thumbnails of all 240 images you have selected.

Now comes the timed part, where things are about to get interesting. :wink

You have 1 (one) hour to cull your plunder down to 12 images and process them as if your life depended on it.

Your entry shall consists of 12 before/after pairs as well as the thumbsheet image you have created.

Keep in mind that you have less than 5 minutes per image, closer to 4 minutes since you also have to cull. Henceforth plan your actions wisely. Use only those techniques you know work, it's not a time or place to learn new thricks.

In case you run out of time (and I assume many of you will) you still post all 12 "befores", and just those "afters" that you managed to finish.

All 12 with one minute to spare. Exporting the results of the processed pictures now, followed by the originals. Then uploaded all 26 pictures for this surprising stressful assignment. I tell you though I was rushed on the last one adn would really have liked another 5 minutes of tweaking, preferably more like half hour in photoshop cloning out a stand I think would have been nice to remove.

Thumb sheets. had to google and thnk about how to get this done. Lightroom will only allow a 15x15 grid (225 photos) so I had to do two at 8x15 (120 each) for two full sheets.
Another issue I had is that a group of the photos were actually doubles. But that is what I randomly selected so I went with it. That actually probably cost me a couple minutes trying to figure out what was going on.

First the order of the pictures got messed up and so this is not the order i processed them in. not really important but it is relevant for the last one when I knew I was basically out of time.

Some of my thoughts about this.

#3... Probably my favourite of the post processing, at least as far as improvement in picture. Learned alot about burning through smoke and dust shooting a war of 1812 reenactment and applied that here.

#4... was actually the last one I did. Would have liked to play more with custom crops and would have loved to take this into photoshop to get rid of the stand holding the plane up. But only had 3 minutes to do the whole thing...

#9... My least favourite. I struggled with the skin tones on this one and looking at it now it looks really green on the processed shot. I think I like the original one more. Really reminds me to stop being lazy and calibrate my monitor too.

#11... Would normally have culled this one. With overexposed shots like this I normally go into the develop module and see if I can recover the blown highlights with a quick slide of the exposure slider in LR. No time for it here so had to make the decision to try to save it with B&W.

#12... Kinda cheating on this one. I remember doing these shots last year and I knew I could get good quick results processing this one.

Good work on WB. I would spend a few more seconds and cleaned up the skin. Quick Duotone/BW could also have made it more interesting.

Nice crop. I only wonder why you shot it vertical to begin with..

Good bold move on this one.

I don't see much of improvement on this one, as well as original itself is not "calling me in". Busy b/g, no clue what's the model plane is doing there... Prolly another image would work better.

I kinda like original better, brings more of environment...

Nice tightening. In fact, you could go for a square crop, lose the bottom part with the white bg and thus have a much greater dinamic range for your subject.

Good call on darkening the BG, but it's still busy and bright enough to fight for attention... More darkening and bold surface blur could have helped.

Nice call on contrast and brightness adjustment. Crop is questionable: just like in #5, environment brings more to the scene. Simply increasing the overall gamma/exposure would whiten/fade it up w/o losing it and would bring details on the pants.

I like the new crop, but the tone correctin seems a bit off. I would also darkened/blurred the BG more.

Nice improvement!

My favorite here. Great save. BW totally works!

Nice color improvement and good riddance of the pole. Unfortunately, colors also poped up on the bg, thus making the crowd and the tractor to compete for viewer's attention. As an idea: go much tighter vertical 2:3, essentially from 1st pole to 3d pole, thus leaving only the camera facing rider and maybe putting an inverse vignette on the BG.

All in all - nice work, glad you made it in one piece. Congrats, mid-terms are over :-)